I had difficulty with the shield block at first but then I realized I was doing the motion wrong. Instead of moving your hand forward in the thumb+index finger direction, think of the nunchuck as the handle of the shield and move your hand straight forward in the direction of your fingers (which is usually down, depending on how you hold the nunchuck).
The big-box stores aren't going to be carrying most of the quirky or non-mainstream titles in the first place, unless they become a surprise break-out hit like Katamari Damacy. If I'm going to go look for, say, Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, I'm going to skip Best Buy and Wal-Mart and go straight to EB already.
It makes sense for GameStop to advertise this de facto exclusivity and work out whatever deal they need to make it reality, since in probably makes no functional difference to the publisher and distributers.
Specifically, it was when the Gamecube price was lowered to $99 and before they phased out the component video connection. The digital output was one of the casualties in bringing the system back to being profitable.
Ever notice that the import version of a CD on amazon tends to be 2x-3x more expensive than the domestic release, if you can even find it?
Amazon does have a bit of a markup, but to be fair, in many cases the CD costs more in the country of release than it would domestically. In Japan, for example, albums usually sell for the equivalent of $30-$40 (thanks to a higher cost of living and certain license fees and taxes).
Actually, I half-agree with him, though not for the reason he gives. I like console exclusive -- assuming I have the console it's exclusive to -- because usually that means the dev team is concentrating on making it the best game they can for that hardware.
Multi-platform games are usually semi-optimized for one system, but not fully-optimized so that they can port it over. RE4 and Tales of Symphonia benefitted hugely for being originally GC-exclusive, and the games would have suffered if they had been concurrently produced for the PS2.
If the corporations are intelligent, they care about both the number of units moved AND the money earned. Especially when you are dealing with video game consoles, and you have to convince developers and publishers to support your console.
It's all well and good for Sony if they are pulling in the same amount of money by selling fewer PS3s for more money, but all Square-Enix is looking at is the fact that there are less than half the number of potential customers out there who have $350 less to spend on their games.
It does, through Site Preferences. You can also specify pop-up handling, user-agent spoofing, cookie handling, and all sorts of other settings on a site-by-site basis.
"Most profitable" means exactly that -- the one who makes the most money, after accounting for expenses. Software is more profitable than hardware because the company keeps a greater percentage of the gross revenues.
Certainly, a larger company like Sony has higher overall revenues and they sold more PS2s than Nintendo sold Gamecubes, but a significantly larger percentage of their revenue comes from hardware. Nintendo is the #1 video game publisher and I'm not sure that Sony's studios are even in the top ten. Sony makes some money from third-party publishers, but not as much as they do on their own games.
You are right in that you have to have a good profit margin to make a lot of money, but you're drawing the wrong conclusions. Sony is the one who has to sell a lot more product because they make less money for each sale. They don't make as much money (if any) on the hardware, and they don't sell as many software titles. Nintendo makes more money per sale, so they don't have to move as many units. Sony has to "shoot for the big pie", because they can't be successful otherwise.
As a final note, regarding your "who will win this round", it's always said that Sony won the last round hands-down. That's true if you're only looking at the raw number of home (non-handheld) consoles sold, but the big picture is that over the lifetime of the PS2, Nintendo has been more profitable than Sony. Roughly converted from yen (at today's rates, which isn't exactly accurate), Nintendo made $4.2bil to Sony's $3.9bil. (Rather than post the raw numbers, I'll link to a previous post.
Indeed. You'd think that they would ask you if you wanted to enable that feature (WiiConnect24) when you were setting up the network configuration in the first place. Or maybe mention something about it in the manual.
I don't live in a major city. If I want to tune the television to the weather channel, it might be ten minutes before I get local forecast information. Using the Wii weather channel would get me to my town's forecast within a minute. That's quicker and easier than going upstairs to my computer, even assuming that the computer is on.
Businesses "win" when they make a profit.
Consumers "win" when businesses make a profit, because the businesses then continue to stay in business and continue to provide the products the consumer wants.
Market share is only a means to the end of making money.
I figured I'd reality-check your reality-check, since people often assume that since Sony's a well-diversified multinational, they must be raking in significantly larger profits. So, I took a look at their annual reports, located here and here.
Sony's annual profits (in millions of yen) for those years were 16754, 15310, 115519, 88551, 103838, and 123616 for a total of 463588. Meanwhile, Nintendo's annual profits for that same term were 96603, 106445, 67267, 33194, 87416, and 98378 for a total of 489303. That means over the last six years, Nintendo was actually more profitable than Sony.
Now, the last couple of years, Sony has been more profitable than Nintendo and the six-year total is dragged down by a few miserable years in 2001 and 2002, but the fact is that Sony did not out-perform Nintendo.
You are correct, but so was the post you're replying to. When you do your second playthough, be sure to pay attention to the last scene of the end credits.
In AC:WW, you certainly can be bitten. Darn buggers sneak up on you in the middle of the night, and pow! The screen fades out and you wake up a bit later, back in your bed.
Now, if only they would let you use the axe Highlander-style on that darned tanuki...
I'm not sure if its the same with the DS, but all the major retailers DID report sales for the GBA SP. As soon as the unit was rung up and the serial number scanned (which is why it was visible from outside the box), the serial, date, and name/location of the store was sent on to Nintendo. That's part of how they kept track of warranty information.
I found this out first-hand when I tried to exchange a silver SP (still unopened) that I bought on clearance at K*B for a black one at Wal-Mart the next day. The customer service lady refused to take the exchange, since she knew it wasn't sold by Wal-Mart. I would say being able to detect fraudulent returns *is* in the retailer's best interest.
I'm assuming you mean the toolbars are invisible, and not the menus.
Right-click on any of the visible toolbars and choose "Customize". At the bottom of the dialog box, highlight the "Show hidden toolbars while customizing option", and voila! You can edit all of the toolbars, even if you don't intend on actually keeping them visible.
Just to be clear, are you claiming that the previous AC keeps a highly-trained and well-respected cadre of market analysts up his ass?
Take a look at the numbers here and here. These are about four months apart, both before and after New Super Mario Brothers, and the January numbers are when there was still a shortage of DSes. Even then, they were moving three times the number of units. More recently, they're selling about six times as many, which has been pretty consistant since supply has been re-established.
Slashdot Mirror
I had difficulty with the shield block at first but then I realized I was doing the motion wrong. Instead of moving your hand forward in the thumb+index finger direction, think of the nunchuck as the handle of the shield and move your hand straight forward in the direction of your fingers (which is usually down, depending on how you hold the nunchuck).
You're in luck. SimCity is coming soon.
It won't be quite the same (you have to blow out fires, for example), but the core of the game should be there.
The big-box stores aren't going to be carrying most of the quirky or non-mainstream titles in the first place, unless they become a surprise break-out hit like Katamari Damacy. If I'm going to go look for, say, Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, I'm going to skip Best Buy and Wal-Mart and go straight to EB already.
It makes sense for GameStop to advertise this de facto exclusivity and work out whatever deal they need to make it reality, since in probably makes no functional difference to the publisher and distributers.
Specifically, it was when the Gamecube price was lowered to $99 and before they phased out the component video connection. The digital output was one of the casualties in bringing the system back to being profitable.
Amazon does have a bit of a markup, but to be fair, in many cases the CD costs more in the country of release than it would domestically. In Japan, for example, albums usually sell for the equivalent of $30-$40 (thanks to a higher cost of living and certain license fees and taxes).
Actually, I half-agree with him, though not for the reason he gives. I like console exclusive -- assuming I have the console it's exclusive to -- because usually that means the dev team is concentrating on making it the best game they can for that hardware.
Multi-platform games are usually semi-optimized for one system, but not fully-optimized so that they can port it over. RE4 and Tales of Symphonia benefitted hugely for being originally GC-exclusive, and the games would have suffered if they had been concurrently produced for the PS2.
If the corporations are intelligent, they care about both the number of units moved AND the money earned. Especially when you are dealing with video game consoles, and you have to convince developers and publishers to support your console.
It's all well and good for Sony if they are pulling in the same amount of money by selling fewer PS3s for more money, but all Square-Enix is looking at is the fact that there are less than half the number of potential customers out there who have $350 less to spend on their games.
It does, through Site Preferences. You can also specify pop-up handling, user-agent spoofing, cookie handling, and all sorts of other settings on a site-by-site basis.
"Most profitable" means exactly that -- the one who makes the most money, after accounting for expenses. Software is more profitable than hardware because the company keeps a greater percentage of the gross revenues.
Certainly, a larger company like Sony has higher overall revenues and they sold more PS2s than Nintendo sold Gamecubes, but a significantly larger percentage of their revenue comes from hardware. Nintendo is the #1 video game publisher and I'm not sure that Sony's studios are even in the top ten. Sony makes some money from third-party publishers, but not as much as they do on their own games.
You are right in that you have to have a good profit margin to make a lot of money, but you're drawing the wrong conclusions. Sony is the one who has to sell a lot more product because they make less money for each sale. They don't make as much money (if any) on the hardware, and they don't sell as many software titles. Nintendo makes more money per sale, so they don't have to move as many units. Sony has to "shoot for the big pie", because they can't be successful otherwise.
As a final note, regarding your "who will win this round", it's always said that Sony won the last round hands-down. That's true if you're only looking at the raw number of home (non-handheld) consoles sold, but the big picture is that over the lifetime of the PS2, Nintendo has been more profitable than Sony. Roughly converted from yen (at today's rates, which isn't exactly accurate), Nintendo made $4.2bil to Sony's $3.9bil. (Rather than post the raw numbers, I'll link to a previous post.
Indeed. You'd think that they would ask you if you wanted to enable that feature (WiiConnect24) when you were setting up the network configuration in the first place. Or maybe mention something about it in the manual.
Oh wait. They do.
I don't live in a major city. If I want to tune the television to the weather channel, it might be ten minutes before I get local forecast information. Using the Wii weather channel would get me to my town's forecast within a minute. That's quicker and easier than going upstairs to my computer, even assuming that the computer is on.
Businesses "win" when they make a profit. Consumers "win" when businesses make a profit, because the businesses then continue to stay in business and continue to provide the products the consumer wants. Market share is only a means to the end of making money.
Remove the couch?
I figured I'd reality-check your reality-check, since people often assume that since Sony's a well-diversified multinational, they must be raking in significantly larger profits. So, I took a look at their annual reports, located here and here.
Sony's annual profits (in millions of yen) for those years were 16754, 15310, 115519, 88551, 103838, and 123616 for a total of 463588. Meanwhile, Nintendo's annual profits for that same term were 96603, 106445, 67267, 33194, 87416, and 98378 for a total of 489303. That means over the last six years, Nintendo was actually more profitable than Sony.
Now, the last couple of years, Sony has been more profitable than Nintendo and the six-year total is dragged down by a few miserable years in 2001 and 2002, but the fact is that Sony did not out-perform Nintendo.
You are correct, but so was the post you're replying to. When you do your second playthough, be sure to pay attention to the last scene of the end credits.
In AC:WW, you certainly can be bitten. Darn buggers sneak up on you in the middle of the night, and pow! The screen fades out and you wake up a bit later, back in your bed.
Now, if only they would let you use the axe Highlander-style on that darned tanuki...
I'm not sure if its the same with the DS, but all the major retailers DID report sales for the GBA SP. As soon as the unit was rung up and the serial number scanned (which is why it was visible from outside the box), the serial, date, and name/location of the store was sent on to Nintendo. That's part of how they kept track of warranty information.
I found this out first-hand when I tried to exchange a silver SP (still unopened) that I bought on clearance at K*B for a black one at Wal-Mart the next day. The customer service lady refused to take the exchange, since she knew it wasn't sold by Wal-Mart. I would say being able to detect fraudulent returns *is* in the retailer's best interest.
I'm assuming you mean the toolbars are invisible, and not the menus.
Right-click on any of the visible toolbars and choose "Customize". At the bottom of the dialog box, highlight the "Show hidden toolbars while customizing option", and voila! You can edit all of the toolbars, even if you don't intend on actually keeping them visible.
Just to be clear, are you claiming that the previous AC keeps a highly-trained and well-respected cadre of market analysts up his ass?
Take a look at the numbers here and here. These are about four months apart, both before and after New Super Mario Brothers, and the January numbers are when there was still a shortage of DSes. Even then, they were moving three times the number of units. More recently, they're selling about six times as many, which has been pretty consistant since supply has been re-established.